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Saturday, 25 June 2011

How to Start Listening to your Forgotten Music

A couple of weeks ago I came across a headline in a story that said "Study: 81% of iTunes Collections Never Get Played. Ever..." According to the story, the average user has 5,409 songs in their iTunes library and only ever plays on average a little over 1,200 of these songs. Over 4,000 songs in the average iTunes collection are never heard.

If you live in a part of the world where Apple sells music over iTunes (unlike those of us here in the United Arab Emirates), it would mean that the average user would've spent close US$ 5,000 downloading music from Apple and wasted about US$ 4,000 of that as they never listened to it.

On the flip side, if Apple were to sell music all over the world (including here in the United Arab Emirates), it would mean Apple could've earned another US$ 4,000 per consumer they have in such regions. With iCloud and Apple's iTunes Match feature where you can start buying music from Apple that is already loaded on your local playlist, it means even more dollar signs for Apple. I'm not even going to start calculating much this could be as the number of zeros would no doubt give me a headache.

How to start listening to the other 4,000 songs

Image: www.YouGotRickRolled.com

There is hope. If you have realized you are on of those with over 4,000 songs that you've never listened to, try setting up your "Genius" feature on iTunes. Genius is a nifty algorithm that Apple have put into iTunes, iPod, iPhone and iPad players that selects songs for you to listen to based on what you're playing right now. For example, I'm listening to some music as I type this blog post. In fact, I'm listening to A-ha's "The Sun Always Shines on TV" and when I clicked on the Genius option, it's set up a play list that includes Chesney Hawkes' "One & Only," Kylie Minogue's "I Should be So Lucky" and "Two Princes" by the Spin Doctors.

What Genius does in essence is match the music to your mood, genre, time period and artist selection. All of a sudden, you're listening to a song from Rick Astley that you forgot ever existed.

The one caveat to having the Genius feature enabled is that it won't work if your Apple account shows you live in a country where Apple doesn't sell music over iTunes. To get around this, you need to setup your Apple account to show that you live in a country where Apple sells music online. I'm not going to get into how this can be done but if you search for it on Google (or the search engine of your choice), you'll no doubt find out how to do this.

If you have a chance, try out Genius and before you know it, you'll be listening to all those of thousands of songs that have been ignored for all these years on your iTunes playlist.